


5 times Wirt tried to go back (and 1 time he realised he didn't need to)

by diapason



Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon)
Genre: 5 Times, Brotherly Bonding, College, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Recovery, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-15 00:25:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14780123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diapason/pseuds/diapason
Summary: Wirt is sixteen when he drowns.--(big tw for suicide attempts! wirt tries to go back to the unknown, until he doesn't. pinescone if you bend over backwards.)





	5 times Wirt tried to go back (and 1 time he realised he didn't need to)

**Author's Note:**

> spat this out in 2 hours enjoy

Wirt is sixteen when he drowns.

It is poison, burning, a million ways to die and all of them agony. It is a week’s worth of struggle, facing his shadows, carrying too many burdens for one boy to bear. It is five minutes unconscious in the water, lungs filling up with water with the deadly slowness of a gas leak but none of the painful choking.

And yet, somehow, it is a brilliant moment of clarity.

When he wakes up, Sara is there and Greg is shaking his frog and none of it was real, or so the neurologist says. Wirt smiles and nods and promises that he’s okay, that he can go back to school after Thanksgiving and he won’t have any problems related to the accident like Greg is – but their stories inexplicably match up, and something in his mind remembers clear as day the biting cold and the constriction of the edelwood branches.

He tells Greg that none of it was real, they just fell in a lake and then came back out. Greg shakes Jason Funderberker and points to the glow; Wirt denies recognition.

But they know. He knows.

\--

Wirt is seventeen when he slits his wrists.

It is stinging, oozing, a million tiny nerve endings brought apart by the razor sharp edge of a broken vinyl. It is eight minutes staring at the red pool that spreads across his jeans and it is thirty seconds of figuring out what he’s going to say to Beatrice and it is nearly an hour before Greg’s dad finds him, screaming for his mom and calling an ambulance and praying Greg won’t understand what’s happened.

When he wakes up, his mom is begging him never to do that again through the fog of whatever they’ve put him on to ease the pain. He watches her, uncomprehending, as she explains exactly what he’s put her through, and decides that pain would be better than the haze of being halfway to nothing.

Later, they let him go, and the first thing he does in the car ride home is silently unwrap the bandaging they’ve given him, only the slightest hiss at the feeling of air on soon-to-be scars escaping him. Greg does not mention it when he gets home, only babbling about whatever happened in class that day.

After their parents are asleep, though, Greg comes into Wirt’s room to shut his window, and whispers, “Did you make it?”

Wirt’s not sure how to respond.

(And the window is open when he wakes, anyway.)

\--

Wirt is eighteen when he jumps.

It is whistling, waiting, a million blades of grass prepared to cushion his fall back onto this side of the train tracks. It is thirty-four minutes from home to the cemetery edge on foot, and it is two hours in the ICU with an untreated broken radius bone before they can get to him.

It is peaceful, and yet it doesn’t work, again.

He wonders if it was something about the train – maybe because it was the witching hour – maybe if he tried again in three months it would work this time. Everybody signs his cast and nobody asks him why, and perhaps it’s for the best. He is assigned a therapist who tells him about how some people who have been close to death before begin to crave the feeling, and he does not tell her that he’s not trying to die, he’s trying to get back to living. Wirt is told to take one pill a day and see if it helps, which it doesn’t.

Greg is going to middle school in August, and he’ll be coming home from school on his own now. This is so unlike the only Greg Wirt ever knew, the one who needed him to go with Greg anywhere or he would do something stupid like get on a steamboat they haven’t paid to board, ~~_like make a deal with the Beast to save Wirt’s life_~~ , that he can’t quite process it.

The other kids have stopped calling Greg funny and started calling him crazy for his stories of bluebirds and bells, so maybe it’s for the best.

\--

Wirt is nineteen when he overdoses.

It is swallowing and retching and forcing himself to keep it down, just a few more minutes, you need this to work, this could be your only chance. It is bright sunlight when he tells his roommate (a sweet guy called Mason, who tells him tales about a sister like Greg but who could never understand) to have a nice day but not to worry if he doesn’t respond, and it is an early November sunset when he is told that his mission was unsuccessful nineteen hours ago. It is breaking down when nobody is in the room anymore, and it is three missed calls from Mom that he’s too broken to answer.

This was not the way to go about it. Not this far from home.

A sweet girl in his Literature class promises him that her sixteenth year was weirder, and when he tells her what he too intricately remembers, she shoves him and accuses him of being just like her lying, manipulative ex, “down to the broken arm”. Wirt wonders if this guy was trying to get back to the crystal sharpness of the Unknown, too, and asks her to explain. An hour later, Zoe is crying into his sweater about emails and orchards and when he pries himself away from her she throws up and then falls over.

Greg texts. He still can’t spell too well, but he wants Wirt to know that they’re best brothers and he can’t wait to see him again. Wirt blinks and realises this has not been labelled a rock fact.

He hadn’t realised how much safer life on meds had felt, but now every brick looks like a promise and every pond looks like an urge.

\--

Wirt is twenty and turning the gun over in his hands.

He can feel it - the beautiful, infinite clarity that would come with the gunshot. Redder than the thin reminders along the veins of his inner arm, faster than the fall and the waiting and the waiting and the waiting, waaay more instantly gratifying than the slow fade of the drugs. It’s the only way to go, really.

It escapes him that this was not how it started. A one-way ticket to the Unknown was not what he set out to find, but it seems to be what he is considering buying.

“Wirt?”

The voice is foreign until it speaks again.

“Why are you looking at guns?”

“Oh, uh, Mason!” he puts it back, “I was… I just… it’s good to see you again?”

“Were you thinking of… you know?”

“No!” Wirt hurriedly lies, “It’s, I’m not like that. Any more.”

“You know you can tell me if something’s bothering you,” Mason says, lowering his voice like he’d be ashamed if they were found.

Wirt laughs mirthlessly. “The last time I told someone what this was about, she said I must be lying and also crazy.”

“Well…” Mason pauses. He must be trying to organise his thoughts, word his affirmations in a way that won’t make Wirt pick the gun back up again. “There are some things I never got over. Some things nobody believes. The only person I could really rely on back then was my sister.”

And Wirt feels a weight rise.

\--

Wirt is twenty-one when they publish the Tome of the Unknown.

It is rising, breathing, healing. It is five days before they become bestsellers and three weeks before the daytime talk shows start calling. It is finally feeling like people understand his story, because they are always talking about it online, and because they do.

Greg does.

They came up with their cover story easily, because people had been telling them it was true for years. Greg had been an imaginative kid with a story he wanted to tell, and Wirt had encouraged it beyond the level of usual sibling encouragement. Adelaide, Lorna, Quincy? Names from the graveyard where Greg had first had the idea. The conspiracy community quickly dug up names and faces matching exactly to the descriptions of the characters Wirt had put to paper, and they denied any connection. And if Jason Funderberker had lived a very long time for a frog… Fame had changed him.

Fame didn’t change Greg, although everyone who called him crazy when he was ten now wanted to be his best friend. He was still the same excitable now-teen who had run around with candy pants and tried to give himself to the Beast so Wirt could make it home. Wirt didn’t really like the spotlight, but always made an effort to clean up for interviews and keep straight his stories of where each character and location came from, in case someone caught him out and he confessed to the reality of the situation.

 

Wirt is twenty-two when he goes back home and, alone, stands among the gravestones that mark his old friends. A bluebird whistles in another tree, and he salutes, a little stiffly.

 

Wirt is twenty-three when Greg asks him, softly, if he ever thinks about going back. He’s the same age Wirt was when it happened. Wirt thinks of being sixteen and tells him that it’s not his time yet, that the Unknown must come to you.

 

Wirt is twenty-four when he realises that he has not thought of killing himself for three years. More interestingly, he realises that he no longer feels like he needs to. And that’s good, he supposes.


End file.
